MORE QUESTIONABLE SCIENCE IN THE NEWS

MORE QUESTIONABLE SCIENCE IN THE NEWS

Yet another ground breaking story on the damage we are doing to the planet surfaced this week. It seems that the National Academy of Science has come out in support of the hockey stick graph, a very dubious little study concocted with what some scientists claim is faulty mathematics.

The ‘hockey stick’ is not just any story. It is the one study that global warming advocates have pinned their faith on. It is their missing link, so to speak. There are, however, those who still doubt the study. Some even think that the stick is broken.

Having said that, let’s look at this newest story and find out what is wrong with it. As somebody who does not buy into the ‘we’re killing the planet’ frenzy, I often weigh the stories that come out and without fail, one can always find a great deal of inconsistencies with the reasoning or lack thereof behind them.

One can, in fact, read any article on the famous graph and conclude simply by the information given within it that the graph cannot be accurate.

Take for example the reason behind the name of the graph. It is termed the ‘hockey stick’ because, after a long period of time of rather stable global temperatures (whatever that is), the earth’s temperature allegedly began to rise. It spiked, thus the shape of a hockey stick on the graph. This apparently began to happen right about the time that the industrial revolution got underway.

We are told that there has been a 1 degree rise in surface temperatures in the northern hemisphere in the last century. One degree. That’s it, and only in the northern hemisphere. I live here. Trust me. One degree doesn’t do much. However, let’s keep following the story.

The Academy of Science’s panel looking into the study was chaired by Gerald North, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M University. That panel agreed with the fact that “it was relatively warm around the year 1000” and that the earth suffered a mini ice age from 1500 to 1850.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if the earth was “relatively warm” and then suffered a mini ice age, all within a 500 year span, should we still believe that the earth’s temperature was almost constant until man fired up his first really big oven? Surely the period of “relative warmth” and the mini ice age had temperature variations of more than one degree. Is that not a fair assumption?

If the temperature fluctuation was not more than the current one degree everyone is panicking about today, then why is science using terms like mini ice age? If the temperature fluctuation was more than one degree back around 1850, or any amount for that matter, why is this anomaly NOT shown on the hockey stick graph?

Further, and something that isn’t in most of the pieces covering this newest story, is the following statement. The NAS panel estimated that there is a roughly 67 percent chance that Mann was right in saying the past 25 years were the warmest in a 1,000 years.